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Dmitry Medvedev’s interview with Vietnamese media

Just ahead of his visit to Vietnam, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev talks with Vietnam News Agency, Vietnam Television, and the Voice of Vietnam radio station.

Transcript:

Dmitry Medvedev’s interview with Vietnamese media

Question (via
interpreter): Mr Medvedev, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed.
Russia has regularly said it could act as a link between the East and the West.
There is huge potential in this concept. Vietnam wants to sign a free trade
area agreement with the members of the Eurasian Economic Union. What tactical
moves are you planning to strengthen Russia’s role in the Asia-Pacific region?
What can ASEAN do in this respect?

Dmitry Medvedev: It’s true that
we have said more than once that we are willing to cooperate with the
Asia-Pacific and ASEAN countries, including Vietnam, and we have also recently
taken steps to this end. To begin with, we regularly visit the regional
countries, meaning Russian officials and business people, not to mention
tourists. We maintain regular contact with our partners in Vietnam. I’ve
recently been to Vietnam, in 2012, and we are now preparing for a very
important visit.

In recent years, we have largely reoriented our
policies towards active cooperation with the Asia-Pacific countries. But
reorientation alone is not enough. It must be backed with practical effort,
such as agreements, participation in various events and ASEAN summits,
relations between regional countries and our new integration alliance – the
Eurasian Economic Union, which includes the drafting of a free trade area
agreement with Vietnam, and other practical actions. I’m talking about an
entire range of possibilities and actions, from contacts at the top level
summit to lower-level ties between people, including business people.

We have many ideas on strengthening relations with our
strategic partner, Vietnam. One of them is a free trade area agreement. It will
likely be the first such agreement to be signed between the Eurasian Economic
Union and an individual country. This would give Vietnam access to a huge
market, which includes not only Russia but also its partners, who together have
over 40 million people.

What’s the promise of this agreement? It opens new
cooperation vistas. I have just discussed the issue with the Economic
Development Minister, and he told me that our talks with Vietnam have entered
the final stage. We’ve moved forward on many issues and intend to conclude
these talks in the near future.

However, we still need to discuss a number of
important issues, because the planned agreement would not only open the
Vietnamese market to Russian commodities, but would also give our Vietnamese
partners access to the Russian market. This is important, but we want more,
because we are trading with Vietnam as it is, and our mutual trade and
cooperation have reached a high point. What we want is to create conditions for
mutual investment. Russia is ready for this. Therefore, we need to work some
more on the investment aspect of the agreement, including industrial
processing, to enable our companies to succeed in Vietnam’s economic
conditions.

There are also issues related to services. I’m not
going to provide details now, but I can assure you that this document is almost
ready, and if we invest a little more effort – I’m going to talk about this
with my partners and colleagues in Vietnam – we’ll be able to finish these
talks quite soon.

In short, I hope that the upcoming talks and my visit
to friendly Vietnam will yield the desired results.

Question: How has
Russian-Vietnamese cooperation been progressing in offshore development on
Vietnam’s continental shelf?

Dmitry Medvedev: It has been progressing very well. We have a good
history of relations in offshore development. And we have our flagship company,
Vietsovpetro, which has been in business since the Soviet Union signed those
agreements. A lot has been done during these years: we have produced hundreds
of millions of tonnes of oil and billions of cubic metres of associated gas.
These are large, world-scale amounts.

This illustrates our mutually beneficial cooperation.
It is for this reason that Russia’s Zarubezhneft and Vietnam’s PetroVietnam
have come to terms on continuing this cooperation until 2030. The prospects
look good.

But this doesn’t mean that we should be satisfied with
what has already been achieved. This is why both Zarubezhneft and other major
public and public-private Russian companies, such as Rosneft and Gazprom, have
partners of their own in Vietnam and each has been negotiating cooperation
agreements.

Rosneft has projects for a set of offshore blocks that
can be offered for development. Talks are ongoing and I hope they’ll have a
positive outcome. At the same time, Gazprom has been engaged in negotiations
since 2009. The degree of maturity on that contract is much higher. Hopefully
the Gazprom-Vietnam project will be up and running at full capacity by 2016. We
think a lot of this partnership and believe it’s beneficial and profitable for
both Vietnam and Russia. We intend to continue this cooperation. We have a
number of Russian projects that we have invited our Vietnamese friends to join
in. To be clear, we invite foreign partners to take part in exploration and
production in the Russian Federation only rarely. The system is working
smoothly as it is. This option has been devised especially for our Vietnamese
partners.

And the last thing: considering that we have been
working together for a long time, it is essential to look for new, promising
forms of cooperation. I’m referring to refining (rather than extraction alone)
and the use of various incentives to encourage cooperation both on Vietnam’s
continental shelf and in the Russian Federation. We should use various
incentivising mechanisms, including taxes, because the reserves have been
depleted where we have been working and it’s necessary either to drill deeper
wells or to look for new fields, which, naturally, calls for additional
investment.

Question: Russia is a leader in the area of research and
technology. What role will the knowledge-based economy play in the regional and
global economies of the future? And what prospects are there for
Russian-Vietnamese cooperation in research and high technology?

Dmitry Medvedev: Thanks for
assessing Russia as a leading country. It’s always nice to hear this from our
partners and friends. Yes, we pay a lot of attention to this, and we believe
that the future belongs to a knowledge-based economy, or more nicely put as the
new economy, based on the use of science and high technology. This is why
Russia is doing its best not to cut investment in research programmes,
technology parks, and research clusters, even in the current comlicated
economic situation. We will continue along this path, and I’d like to emphasise
this, despite the whole list of unfavourable economic factors. Why are we doing
this? The world rightly believes that the future of any economy largely depends
on the technology it is using, its equipment and machinery, and its
technological solutions. This is a global trend, and the direction that the
world is headed. I know that our Vietnamese friends share this view. I learned
this during my visit to various facilities in Vietnam, including a university,
where I saw huge interest in research and scientific cooperation. This is good
considering our cooperation in education and research goes back decades.

I’ll never forget a meeting with some Vietnamese
comrades who had studied in the Soviet Union or Russia. It was a memorable day.
What was important is not just our friendship, but also the fact that our
Vietnamese friends had gained their knowledge and experience in the Soviet
Union or Russia, and are now applying them in ways beneficial to Vietnam and
our friendly relations. Not surprisingly, we are ready for any form of
cooperation with our Vietnamese friends.

Take the Ninh Thuận 1 Nuclear Power Plant, which is a
good example of the use of high technology. Russia is a world leader in the nuclear
industry and nuclear power. But operating such facilities takes more than money
and building such a complicated facility is only the beginning, because you
need qualified personnel to operate it safely and securely. This is why we are
training Vietnamese personnel in Russia, including at the MEPhI National Research Nuclear University, who
will work either at this nuclear power plant or contribute to the development
of high technologies, including nuclear technology, in Vietnam. I see this as a
shining example of our cooperation, but not the only one. I hope to see many
more examples like this in the future.

Question: You have visited Vietnam
several times and you just said that you were very impressed by the meeting
with the graduates of Soviet and Russian universities. Can you share your
Vietnam-related impressions on the occasion of your upcoming visit to that
country?

Dmitry Medvedev: With pleasure! It’s always good to visit your country
because I can see it developing and changing. I first went to Vietnam as a
member of an official delegation some 12 or 13 years ago and it was quite clear
at that time that the Vietnamese economy was developing at a rapid pace. I was
interested. I have been following your successes closely and I’d like to say
that they are most impressive. Very impressive! You can see progress in
industry and agriculture, lifestyles and living standards. And the latter is
possibly the most important thing because our countries – I mean Vietnam and
the Soviet Union – were not the richest countries in the world 20 or 30 years
ago. Today these successes are in evidence, and we are very happy about that.

But there is another thing. Alongside the modern, fast
developing and energetic Vietnam that is emerging as one of the leaders in the
Asia-Pacific region, there is an ancient Vietnam that has a special history and
culture of its own and I won’t hide the fact that these are of great interest
to us as well. I’m always interested in seeing monuments of culture and history
and typical Vietnamese scenes. If I have a chance I like to photograph them. I
hope I’ll have this opportunity during my upcoming visit.

And lastly, there is one more thing I cannot fail to
mention. We really have very cordial relations. We don’t simply say this as a
matter of course, it’s a reality. This is a historical fact. I shared my
impressions of how I became acquainted with our Vietnamese comrades who worked
in Leningrad, including at the institute where my father was a teacher.
Practically nothing has changed since then. Each meeting of this kind is a
meeting of very good friends that generates a lot of emotions. I’m sure it will
be this way now as well.

Question: There are important holidays ahead. Vietnam will
celebrate 40 years of the liberation of South Vietnam and the country’s
reunification on 30 April, and Russia will mark the 70th anniversary of the
great Victory in early May. Why are these dates so important? What do you hope
for people on these dates?

Dmitry Medvedev: They are hugely
important. In your case, Vietnam’s reunification was the first step towards its
subsequent development. It is a highly valued national holiday, and we took
this into account when preparing the agenda of our visit to Vietnam. We’ll go
to southern Vietnam for the first time, which will be an interesting and
important trip. I see this as a symbolic event because we remember how it was.
Even I remember this. It was a long time ago, yet I remember the Vietnamese
people’s heroic struggle, our assistance and support in their struggle, and the
ultimate result. Please accept my sincere congratulations on the upcoming
holiday.

As for Victory Day, it is an international holiday. It
was a common victory over a global evil, Nazism, which was brought about by
many countries and nations. We are preparing for the 70th anniversary of
Victory very thoroughly. I’d like to stress that this is not only a Russian but
an international holiday because it was a world war, when death reaped a
terrible harvest, killing millions. We must do our best to prevent a repetition
of those terrible events, which is why such celebrations are very important for
the upbringing of future generations. We are happy to see our Vietnamese
friends at such events. Let’s celebrate them together.

Question: Mr Prime Minister, until recently Russia was among
the top ten sources of tourists in Vietnam and the leader by the growth rate of
tourists. But the number of Russian tourists plummeted by 40 percent in 2015
for obvious reasons. How can we reverse this trend?

Dmitry Medvedev: Believe me, the
situation will improve. The current decline is due to economic difficulties and
problems with the value of the rouble. There are objective reasons for the
decline of our people’s purchasing power, but let’s consider the tourist issue
from a different angle. In 2014, the number of Russian tourists increased by
over 30 percent. Even though it has decreased this year, it wasn’t a plunge but
a return to the 2013 level. There are many Russian tourists in Vietnam, even if
not as many as from other countries, but still, the number is about 400,000 a
year. It’s clear that the economic component is very important here (I hope
this problem will be resolved soon along with economic stabilisation). As for
tourist attractions, Russians love to spend their vacations in Vietnam. Vietnam
is an interesting country with an ancient culture and good holiday destinations,
so I have no doubts about this. But I feel that this should be a two-way
process. Note that approximately 75,000 to 80,000 Vietnamese tourists travel to
Russia every year – I’m not talking about those who come to Russia in search of
jobs: there are many more of those. I’m only talking about tourists. I think we
should invest more effort in this area, considering that Vietnam has a large
population. Russia is a large country with many attractions, and we’re always
glad to welcome tourists. I think we have a solid opportunity to develop the tourist
exchange between our countries.

Question: Is it possible, or are there any practical plans,
that Russia and Vietnam will use national currencies for mutual settlements?

Dmitry Medvedev’s interview with Vietnamese media

Dmitry Medvedev: Certainly.
First, there are no obstacles to making settlements in roubles and dongs. None
from the legal point of view. But we need an economic reason for this. We
agreed on the possibility of using our national currencies for mutual
settlements nearly ten years ago and even created a Russian-Vietnamese bank.
But using national currencies is only suitable when the volume of mutual trade
is high and you need to accumulate resources in roubles or dongs. So far, these
settlements only account for about 1.5 percent of trade, with all the other
settlements made in US dollars, which is not always advantageous because the
dollar is a foreign currency in Russia and Vietnam, and we need to buy dollars
for subsequent settlements, making us heavily dependent on the exchange rate. In
this sense, it could be more profitable to make mutual settlements in our
national currencies, namely in trade and investment. We are currently promoting
this in mutual settlements with other partner countries. I think there is a
good opportunity to do this also in relations with Vietnam. I will definitely
raise this issue at the upcoming talks with my Vietnamese partners.

In conclusion, I’d like to say that we hope for good
results from this visit. We will spend a lot of time there and visit many places.
I view this as both an indication of our special relations, and an investment
in their continued development and strengthening.